Goons
During his first few months on the server, due to anxiety and/or shyness, Kayden was only willing to associate with a select few members on the server. For ease of pinging, these members were given the "Goons" tag by Sayvion during one of his weeks as Rotating Admin in November. However, as Kayden has become increasingly comfortable with the community and the tag has been given to more and more people, the label has begun to lose its meaning. History Within his first month of participating in Tempire, Kayden had already acquired an entourage (Jaleel, Jasper, Sayvion, and Sean). Almost every day they would assemble to play League and discuss life, and after a few weeks this group had produced its own inside jokes and bonds of trust, becoming a subculture of sorts within Tempire. By mid-autumn, they were calling themselves "the Goons", and although their roster was unclear from an outside perspective, within the group they made heavy distinction between who was and wasn't a Goon. In the final weeks of October, they began to escalate their emphasis on the "differences" between the Goons and non-Goons. Jasper preached about the existence of a specific Goon mentality, and a specific "Hoolygoons" League club was formed for their clique only. On the 26th, after Jasper spammed nightmare fuel in the wrong channel and was given a strike, the Goons openly denounced Max and launched a disorganized rebellion. To assist with this, Sayvion made a separate server entitled "Goon Lagoon" where he and his supporters wouldn't be subject to the rules of Tempire, despite the fact that Sayvion himself had consented to and helped write said rules. The existence of Goon Lagoon, though it quickly fell into disuse, further separated the Goons from the rest of the community. Finally, in the wake of the Gray Affair, Sayvion gave himself, Jasper, Sean, Kayden, and Jaleel a Goons tag to officialize the clique (Sean quickly asked for the tag to be removed, citing the unnecessary and excessive notifications). Although ostensibly just for ease of pinging, this tag formalized what had until that point been an arbitrary distinction. Now, the server could actually differentiate between who was and wasn't a Goon, and they began to mobilize as an effective (and annoying) political force. Sayvion, who was still chafing from losing his moderator status after his failed swing at Davis in October, used the Goons's unconditional support to push for additional clout within Tempire's leadership, while at the same time leveraging the threat of moving fully to the Goon Lagoon server. Though he did not push for any radical changes, he did begin claiming that he was being "oppressed" by the server leadership, while also requesting a private, Goons-only channel. Meanwhile, the group began to expand through a three-way monopoly: they were the most active in-call participants in Tempire, the only group running DnD campaigns at the time, and had Jaleel openly promoting them to the SCAD Squad. This led to Ash, Brendan, and James joining their ranks over the course of November, with Nikhil seeking admission as well. While these new additions gave further weight to Sayvion's leadership demands, none of them were particularly good at League. This complete saturation in low-skill players led to Goons to start adopting more wild gaming tendencies; rather than try to win the game conventionally, they would just do whatever gratified them, allowing them to still have fun despite almost never winning. However, these incompatible gaming tendencies created even more of a gap between the Goons and the rest of Tempire. In early December, Kayden proclaimed himself the Alpha Goon. After Sayvion lost his admin status following another power struggle with Davis in early December, the Goons mostly gave up on politics. like-minded individuals who he gamed with often , the Goons have continued expanding their ranks and even received their own private channel within Tempire, becoming an active and formidable force in Tempire politics. However, as members who don't play many games in the server (Abhi, Sergio, Tova) have become inducted into the Goons' ranks, the already unclear definition of what a "Goon" is has become even murkier. Nowadays, rather than indicating friends who casually chat and game with each other, the tag has come to mean little more than that an individual is likely to support Sayvion in a crisis.